[stonesixone]

> I don't think you need to invoke an essentially mysterious "conscious" property of the mind to explain that.

I don't think consciousness is being invoked to "explain" any of the things you list. The issue to explain is why we observe consciousness existing or accompanying these things in the first place (for ourselves). For example, one can imagine a system capable of referencing itself, choosing actions based on that, etc, that isn't conscious. That's a philosophical zombie. So the question is why aren't we all philosophical zombies.

[ozy]

A system that can observe things, and also observe its own observations, its own mental states, it is not so clear that such a system can be a p-zombie.